Coming Soon : Office 2000

Web integration
Slated to ship this spring, Office 2000 is loaded with new features that extend desktop productivity to the Web. This new integration with the Web, combined with the longstanding appeal Office has for users, provides you with a great opportunity to build intranets and Internet sites into your clients’ business processes.

Many of the new enhancements—most notably Web integration features—are found in applications across the suite. But each of the individual products has something new to boast.

Your customers are going to be asking you about those enhancements. Prepare for their questions by getting familiar now with the product-specific features found in the most commonly used applications:

• Word 2000
• Excel 2000
• PowerPointŪ 2000
• Outlook™ 2000

Your increased knowledge about these products and their unique features will help you create more revenue opportunities for yourself by finding ways to integrate them into your clients’ overall solutions.

The Word on Word
Word 2000 has added new functionality to help your clients easily create professional-looking documents for print, e-mail—and now the Web. Help your clients get up to speed with these handy new features:

• Click-n-Type: Click-n-Type allows your customers to insert text in a document by simply double-clicking where they want to type. Word shows them what formatting will be applied through simple cursor hinting and automatically applies the appropriate formatting, such as extra lines, tabs, alignment and text wrapping.
• What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) Font Menu: Word 2000 introduces a WYSIWYG (pronounced wizywig) Font Menu, which allows your clients to see what the font looks like from the drop-down menu on the toolbar. In this way, they can spend less time finding the font type they want for their document.
• Quick File Switching: Your customers will have more immediate access to any individual Word document. If more than one Word document is open, each one will have its own button on the Windows Taskbar. Moving from one Word document to the next will be as easy as moving between open applications.

Excel to New Heights
Excel 2000 allows users to easily create and share rich Web documents with the same Excel tools they have used for years to create printed documents. To further help your clients track and analyze data, Excel 2000 also offers the following enhancements:

• Enhanced Web Queries: The new Web Query Wizard makes it much easier to bring data from the Web into Excel for tracking or analysis. This wizard takes users step-by-step through the process of capturing data—such as market or financial information—from a Web page and importing it into Excel. Web Query pages can be refreshed automatically on a scheduled basis.
• Euro Currency: Excel 2000 supports the euro currency format. It displays both the euro symbol and the three-letter ISO code (EUR), enabling your clients who do business with a European company or government to exchange spreadsheets with the most up-to-date currency values.
• Large Data Stores: This new client/server approach enables Excel 2000 to deal more effectively and efficiently with large databases on the server. When a user runs a query, Excel 2000 will only import the aggregate data that the user requested, rather than the entire data set. For example, say you want to create an Excel application that helps track and analyze inventory for your client, and that application connects to a SQL Server™ database. When your client runs a query to find out how many widgets are left in the warehouse, Excel 2000 will import only that specific data and leave the rest on the server.

Unleash the Power of PowerPoint
With the new features of PowerPoint 2000, you can help your clients develop presentations that can be easily published on the Web and presented to remote audiences around the globe. PowerPoint 2000 enables your clients to use the familiar presentation tools they already know to show and collaborate on presentations over their company’s intranet.

• Presentation Broadcast: PowerPoint 2000 uses Microsoft NetShow™ technology to enable broadcasting of presentations to a wide audience over an intranet. Suppose your client holds frequent training seminars for its sales force, which is scattered across the country. Instead of flying each salesperson out to the corporate headquarters every month, your client can now conduct the seminars online by broadcasting PowerPoint presentations over their intranet.
• Online Meetings: PowerPoint 2000 adds NetMeeting™ integration for presentations, providing a real-time collaboration solution for those clients whose employees are not all under one roof. NetMeeting creates a “virtual conference room” that enables employees in remote locations to view and collaborate on a PowerPoint presentation together in real time. For example, your clients’ employees in Chicago, Miami and Denver can create, edit and discuss an upcoming presentation for the board of directors without leaving their respective offices.
• Support for International Users: PowerPoint 2000 provides one single code base for all users worldwide. So you can roll out the same version of the product (rather than several foreign language versions) to many of your clients’ overseas offices to meet the needs of all users. And it means a significant reduction in the complexity of supporting PowerPoint in multiple languages.

A Very Sunny Outlook
Microsoft Outlook™ 2000 delivers powerful and easy-to-use e-mail that is now integrated even more tightly with calendar, contacts, tasks and especially Internet information. With Outlook 2000’s new Web integration capabilities, you can help your clients effectively connect, communicate and collaborate over their intranet, the Internet and Microsoft Exchange Server.

Here’s a glimpse at some of the other new features that make Outlook 2000 more than just an e-mail client:

• Outlook Bar Shortcuts: Your clients can now create a shortcut in the Outlook Bar to any file, folder or Web page. If your client wants to create a shortcut to a Web page, Outlook will display a preview of it in the right-hand pane. Users will save time by eliminating the need to keep opening the appropriate application or browser to view a file.
• Send E-mail in HTML Format: Your customers and their employees can compose a particular message easily using any Office application and then send it as HTML. That means your client can use Office 2000 to draft a message, but the recipient won’t need to start Office—or even have Office installed on her or his machine—to read the mail.

With Office 2000, the Web can facilitate face-to-face teamwork and project collaboration—in large part by reducing the more tedious types of interaction such as data retrieval and scheduling. Beyond the suite-wide improvements, each of the individual Office products have been enhanced to make them easier to use and, ultimately, to make it easier for your clients to get business done. By giving your clients more time and energy to do what they do best, you will continually be creating opportunities for yourself to do the same.